George Street Playhouse’s ‘Gene & Gilda’ resurrects, and celebrates, Wilder and Radner

T. CHARLES ERICKSON

Jordan Kai Burnett and Jonathan Randell Silver co-star in “Gene & Gilda,” which The George Street Playhouse is presenting at The New Brunswick Performing Arts Center.

“There’s never been anyone like you in comedy before,” Gene Wilder tells Gilda Radner in “Gene & Gilda,” the play by Cary Gitter that is currently being presented by George Street Playhouse at The New Brunswick Performing Arts Center. Undeniably true. And Jordan Kai Burnett, who plays Radner, does a great job of reminding us why Radner was so special, and so unique.

“The most unusual woman I ever met,” as Wilder says as another point in the play

T. CHARLES ERICKSON

Jonathan Randell Silver and Jordan Kai Burnett in “Gene & Gilda.”

Opposite her, Jonathan Randell Silver also seems uncannily like Wilder. The best thing about the play, which is directed by Joe Brancato, is that you feel like you are spending some time in the presence of two people you remember fondly (Radner died in 1989; Wilder, in 2016). The worst thing is that there are also moments when they seem like Radner and Wilder caricatures and not real people.

Gitter had memoirs to work with — Radner’s “It’s Always Something,” and Wilder’s “Kiss Me Like a Stranger” — plus various interviews that the two did during their lives. Yet it sometimes seem like he is simply taking an amalgam of Wilder’s onscreen characters and imagining what would happen if they met an amalgam of Radner’s onscreen characters.

This includes having Wilder possess a “comfort handkerchief” that he is attached to as fervently as Leo Bloom clung to his blue blanket in “The Producers”; having Radner say “Never mind,” like her “Saturday Night Live” character Emily Litella, after Wilder seems shocked by something she says; and having both of them do a half-serious, half-silly dance together, just like Radner and Steve Martin did in a famous “SNL” skit.

Especially in the first half of the play, Radner is portrayed as a mercurial mix of the sweet and the sour, and Wilder is monumentally neurotic, to the point of literally writhing on the floor in angst.

Gitter’s dialogue is snappy, but sometimes has that sitcom-like quality of seeming too snappy to be real. And he overuses one particular device:

Wilder: It’s about the principle of the thing!
Radner: Aw, principle schminciple!

Then, at another point:

Wilder: I haven’t written anything since the ’70s
Radner: And the last thing you did, you got an Oscar nomination.
Wilder: Oscar Schmoscar!

And then, at yet another point:

Wilder: You think it’s wise to just rush into another (marriage)?
Radner: Wise schmise!

T. CHARLES ERICKSON

Jordan Kai Burnett in “Gene & Gilda.”

Also, Radner was one of the wittiest comedians of our lifetime. To have one of her comebacks be “What am I, chopped liver?” just isn’t cutting it.

Most of the play covers the time period from when Radner and Wilder met, in 1981 (on the set of the first of the three movies they made together, “Hanky Panky”), up until her battle with cancer, in 1987.

But it has a framing device, too. It starts after Radner’s death: Wilder is giving a TV interview and the host is trying to get him to talk about her. He doesn’t want to, but Radner appears to him, as a wise-cracking ghost, and gets him to open up. (He converses with her even as he continues to take part in the interview.) We then flash back to when Radner and Wilder met, and the rest of the play takes us through their unconventional courtship — Radner was still married to guitarist G.E. Smith, but that bothered Wilder more than her — and then a breakup, a reconciliation, their marriage, career ups and downs and, finally, her battle with ovarian cancer.

Occasionally, the TV-interview-and-ghost premise returns. I’m not sure what this framing device added, except, maybe, to show an older Wilder, still so devastated by his loss that he has a hard time talking about it

There are other elements of the play that unquestionably work very well, though. One is a tour-de-force scene when Radner, thinking of returning to Broadway (where she had already triumphed with her “Gilda Radner: Live From New York” show in 1979), shows Wilder how she can play five of her signature “Saturday Night Live” characters — Barbara Walters, Emily Litella, Judy Miller, Candy Slice and Lisa Loopner — at once: They talk to each other, with Radner rapidly switching from one to the next. Just an amazing job by Burnett to get all these characters exactly right.

Jonathan Randell Silver in “Gene & Gilda.”

I also felt that, while the play started a bit cartoonishly, it picked up strength as it went on. Radner and Wilder open up to each other about struggles they had experienced in their lives — she with an eating disorder, he with abuse he suffered at military school. They decide to have a child together — she is hearing her biological clock ticking — but are unable to. They let their guards down and become more affectionate with — and appreciative of — each other.

This is ultimately a very sweet love story. And Radner’s illness is handled tastefully and respectfully.

It almost seems like Gitter had two contradictory impulses, when it came to this material. He wanted to celebrate the characters Radner and Wilder played on television and in movies. But he also wanted to show us what these two performers were like, offstage.

Those are two very different goals to have. And a lot of of ground to cover — since Radner and Wilder both had very complicated personal histories and complex personalities — in one 80-minute, one-act play. Perhaps it would have been better to stick to one approach, or the other.

George Street Playhouse will present “Gene & Gilda” through Dec. 22, with live streaming offered Dec. 14 at at 2 and 7:30 p.m. Visit georgestreetplayhouse.org.